The Wicked Problem of Wicked Problems

All Knotted Up...Like a Wicked Problem

Wicked problems are receiving a lot of attention these days giving much excitement to systems thinkers and designers alike. Yet what these problems mean for planning and understanding social programs and policies is not clear and may be even more wicked that it first appears.

I was excited to learn that Jon Kolko and his creative band of learners at the Austin Center for Design (AC4D) are coming out with a book on wicked problems. As one who studies and helps others to intervene in addressing such problems, this was like being a Star Trek fan learning that Leonard Nimoy was coming to speak at the Trekkie convention in my hometown. It is refreshing to see that the concept of the wicked problem is gaining traction beyond the small band of scholars and practitioners working at the intersection of complexity, systems and design thinking (which, admittedly is where many AC4D folk inhabit, but hopefully their audience will not).

As our social lives become more interconnected through the Internet, globalization, and mass migration, the complexity of the situations we find ourselves in grows. More of anything in diverse forms interacting together is likely to create complexity as new properties emerge and those properties change the trajectory of actions and reactions of the parts dynamically.

As one who is interested in wicked problems and works with people to address them, I should be thrilled to see the term used so widely. I am, but cautiously so. There is a risk that in the enthusiasm to embrace the lexicon of complexity that the meaning gets lost, which is what one gets from the hype cycle (See below).

The Hype Cycle: Coming to a Wicked Problem Near You?

The hype cycle is described as phenomonena initiated by a technology (or idea) and, once caught on, spikes the expectations beyond reason leading to discouragement, mass abandonment of the idea, and then — hopefully — a return to a level of reasonable return.

While the “cycle” (it is not a cycle) has limitations, the analogy here is well suited to fads of various types and the rapid ascension of the concept “wicked problem” in past years is indicative of a trend. Below are two representations of the amount of citations of the work “wicked problem” and “wicked problems” from Google’s Ngram service:

Wicked Problem Citations: 1950-2008

Wicked Problem(s) Citations: 1973-2008

It appears that wicked problems (plural) are increasing and reference to a single problem is staying the same.

Regardless, an upward trend is evident. What it means is another matter…

If wicked problems are becoming talked about more often and by more people, it is appropriate to ask what kind of impact that this new thinking will have on not only the way the problems are posed, but how people seek to address them.

To that end, it is worth envisioning the future with caution. One of the reasons for this is that wicked problems are often not wholly wicked in their composition or the strategy required to address the problem — which ironically makes these types of problems even more wicked.

This has to do with the interconnected, multidimensional, and embedded nature of the problems themselves which contain within them many interconnected non-wicked problems. I’ve started to see difficulties with organizations developing strategy that fails to consider this. It is, as I’ve discussed before, an artefact of either-or thinking. Tackling the kind of wicked problems like poverty, chronic disease, and global finance require a meta-level strategy that recognizes, shapes and adapts to complexity, while accounting for micro-level issues that are indeed, very linear and simple.

Finding, training and retaining the right talent to work with diverse communities on problems that are poorly supported or funded from many sources is wicked. The human resource needs for payroll, supply management, and field support might be much less so. Yet, both are joined-up and require strategies that can extend beyond traditional management and strategy, but also embrace some of the very ‘best practices’ that seem at the outset to be antithetical to complexity.

Just as I shake my head in frustration at seeing complexity dealt with using amplified linear strategies that ‘do the wrong things righter‘, I have surprised myself by how much I’ve been twitching at hearing recent converts to systems thinking rail against the traditional ways of planning as if anything other than seeing problems as complex would be wrong.

At issue is that wicked problems are made more so by having both complex and non-complex elements working together, requiring a level of strategy development that is far more sophisticated than many first thought. Even a review of the better management texts using complexity give short shrift to the relationship between the complex, the simple and the complicated working simultaneously in environments and how we plan for that. The Cynefin Framework provides a start, but just a start.

Until we recognize this complexity — no pun intended — in the way we plan, there is great risk of replicating the hype cycle when our sole use complexity-based models yield poor results of a different nature than the poor results we are seeing from traditional linear, reductionist thinking models applied to many of the problems we deem as wicked today.

7 Comments on “The Wicked Problem of Wicked Problems”

Hype Cycle. I like that. Intuitively I have called it “jumping on a bandwagon” and I am concerned that many of our new terms are suffering from a hype cycle. Knowledge mobilization (and its many K whatever equivalents). Social innovation. Both of these are potentially important in addressing wicked problems as they help leverage investments in higher education research and expertise. Trouble is many many folks are using knowledge mobilization interchangeably with dissemination (or worse, as a new term to describe communications) and these terms risk losing their meaning, or at least their differentiation.

Is jumping on the band wagon the same thing as the hype cycle? Perhaps jumping on the bandwagon drives the hype cycle.

Indeed, the bandwagon effect is something that plagues good ideas. The KM/ KT /K__ is a great example of an idea that people grab a kernel of and then fail to enact in a manner that keeps the integrity of the original concept. Too often KM is something like — as you suggested — a dressed up dissemination plan or “leave the office occasionally to talk to someone who might know someone who might be somewhat interested in something you do” . Is this a bit cynical sounding?

At the same time, there is gold in the original idea and our challenge is to find the way to accept that hype cycles and bandwagons happen and to find ways to ensure that we maintain the integrity of the original ideas throughout the cycle so they see that plateau of promise (my word).

Waste is a great example of a wicked problem — one that has two competing realities that often conflict with one another, yet must coexist. Indeed, there are overlapping areas of problem wickedness here. We have a society that involves producing ‘stuff’ that leads to a lot of waste. The more healthier the economy, the (usually) more healthy the public, but the more waste is produced, which counteracts our health and weakens our society’s wellbeing. From a waste management perspective the problem is also wicked. The more waste collected, the more resources go to waste collection and management, but if waste management is also about reducing demand and creating cleaner cities, then this is somewhat at odds.

The way to deal with this is not simple. Holding the two ideas together at the same time — abductive reasoning (see the Library section of this site for Roger Martin’s book on the topic) — and constant reflection within an organizational climate that is willing to contemplate how these two truths can coexist is the best way to deal with it. Focusing on larger goals, while adapting the means to achieving these goals as the circumstances warrant is another good start.

None of this is easy or simple, but it can help better than designing strategies based on linear, incorrect and restricted assumptions that don’t bear out in reality.